Praying for Rain in the Rain-forest

Kaffa Zone, our area of Ethiopia, is known to be green and lush. The mountainous, forest receives so much rain that the growing season is nearly year round. We complain about the mud most of the year, but since last December, it has been sunny and beautiful. We have had four months of relatively dry weather. The problem is that our water system here at the clinic is based on rain collection. We have slowly watched our reserves dwindle until last month when it hit a critical stage. We started conserving every drop of the precious clear liquid--short, infrequent showers, not washing our clothes, flushing the toilet only once day. We made several trips each week to a small stream about 3 miles down the hill. We put every bucket and container we could find in the pack of the car, filled them up with brown river water, and then drove back carefully trying not to spill it all on the road.

Lest you think that Lalmba was unprepared and completely dependent upon rain, I should tell you about our second system of water collection. There is a natural spring at the bottom of the valley next to our clinic that has water year round. Over 10 years ago, the organization built a collection tank around this spring and then a system of pipes (over 200 yards long) so that they could pump this water up to the clinic. This year when we went down to inspect the spring, it was nearly dry. Barely a trickle was flowing and that precious trickle was not reaching our collection tank. I, Andrew, made this discovery over a month ago. Since then, we have been trying and failing to fix the problem--all the time praying for rain. Eventually we had to bust out a wall of cement and rock to move the collection pipe down about a foot and a half. With this done we thought for sure we would get water. Then we realized that all the pipes were clogged with layers of hardened dirt and mud. We dug out the entire length of pipe, cleaned them all (with only a trickle of water, mind you) and replaced several rusted out connectors. Finally yesterday we connected the last section and were watching that slow trickle fill up the collection tank. As we connected the last of the pipes, it began to rain.
God answered our prayers for rain.

Yesterday I took a shower and put on clean clothes. Alea, our three year old, thanked God for the rain. She loves the rain and the mud. Now it has rained all day and I even caught myself complaining about the mud. How easily I forgot the dry months when I prayed so hard for God to send rain.